Virtualization, Cloud and Your Phone System Collide

The decisions being made by IT today impact so many different areas of the business.  In many cases, technology and network upgrades and refreshes are done on an ad-hoc basis, whether due to varying refresh cycles, certain initiatives taking priority, or the lack of budget to accomplish more at one time.  Although in the short term this makes sense, it may actual hinder the ROI of certain projects long term.  Look at communications.

For a long time, enterprise communications infrastructure had been kept isolated.  The real time nature of voice, from TDM to VoIP, has always been handled separately in the network, for reasons of performance, reliability, and ultimately, the on demand requirements. For these reasons, there has always been a “phone” guy and an “IT/network” guy within the IT organization.  Even with the emergence of VoIP, which should have eliminated much of the need for two different groups, real time communications continued to be treated separately, and caused friction within the two groups.  The finger pointing game became much worse.  

However, when thinking about the overall strategy of either virtualizing the data center or moving to the cloud (and/or both), all areas of the IT environment must be carefully considered.  There are many options in the market today that enable a communications platform to be integrated into the overall strategy of a virtualized datacenter. 

Great strides have been made in virtualizing voice, as both virtualization and communications vendors came together to address the challenges of latency and jitter.  Many communications vendors today offer their unified communications solutions in some virtualized manner.  Virtual appliances have also made an impact on communications, with vendors packaging solutions on virtual appliances to offer an easily deployable solution.

Parallel to this, the re-emergence of communications as a service has impacted the market.  In Frost & Sullivan’s 2010 Cloud Computing Survey, 55 percent of respondents indicated that communications/collaboration would be one of the top three applications considered for the cloud.  As organizations look to drive cost out of their IT infrastructure, the cost of on-premise communications equipment in some instances just isn’t worth the management and maintenance anymore.  It becomes much more efficient to move off-premise and have someone else manage it, keeping more of the business value critical applications instead.

Although communications are still mission critical to enterprises today, the reality is that there are many service providers who can manage and maintain communications so much better than in the past. Enterprises are leveraging this expertise, while reallocating their own resources to new, strategic initiatives within their organizations.

It’s essential that, when looking at the overall, long term IT strategy, every aspect be taken into account so that IT leadership understands how the pieces all fit with each other.  As more components impact one another, such as desktops, mobile devices, storage, servers, communications, etc., it’s critical that you work closely with vendors, partners and service providers who can provide the big picture. This helps you understand how the change of one component can impact the other, and why it may be more cost efficient or effective to either combine certain initiatives, or phase them out appropriately.

It’s also important to understand that, if there is a mixed environment and you have some functions/workloads/applications in the cloud and some on-premise, then it will still be necessary to understand how they interact with one another. 

Just because communications, for example, are being handled by a service provider doesn’t mean it’s not necessary to understand how it still fits within the overall organization’s IT strategy.  This type of broad understanding helps an IT organization extract and deliver the business value to its

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